During the excavations conducted by the German OrientalSociety conducted between 1903 and 1914 in the ruins of Assur—the Assyrian capital and royal residence located on the Tigris—thousands upon thousands of clay tablets were discovered, broken into small and tiny fragments. For many years, the Assur research project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities has been cataloging these finds and, from the shards of the tablets, bringing to life the literature of the Ancient Near East that had been forgotten for millennia.

Founded by Prof. Dr. Stefan M. Maul, the research project was established in 1998, initially funded with funds from the Leibniz Awards. In 2003, the state of Baden-Württemberg took over funding until the research project found a new home in 2004 within the Federal-State Academies Program. This funding will finally expire at the end of 2023. Twenty-one volumes have been published. The last 6 are scheduled to go to press in the coming months. Even though this by no means marks the end of the Heidelberg Assur research, the conclusion of funding under the Academies Program is an occasion to pause, celebrate, and thank all our supporters.

Program

Eckart Frahm (external link) is an ancient Near Eastern scholar and professor at Yale University. He earned his Ph.D. and habilitation under the project’s initiator and research center director Stefan Maul and collaborated on the research project.

Further information on the project

www.hadw-bw.de/research/research project/edition-of-literary-cuneiform-texts-from-Assyria